Chris Roberts: White Men Should Read Raymond Chandler - "Surrounded by sleaze at best and evil at worst, he does what he can, when he can, in a world that often seems dedicated to caving in on itself. In other words, [Philip Marlowe] is like race dissidents today.

 

After his 1996 novel, Fight Club, became a sensation, Chuck Palahniuk explained one of the reasons he wrote it:

[B]ookstores were full of books like The Joy Luck Club and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and How to Make an American Quilt. These were all novels that presented a social model for women to be together. But there was no novel that presented a new social model for men to share their lives.

Mr. Palahniuk’s writing captures a much needed masculine view of the ills of society. But they are all degenerate. The protagonists are anti-heroes, the perverted acts in many of the books could make the cashier at a smut shop blush, and Mr. Palahniuk’s love of shocking his readers is too often his first priority. Many other politically incorrect writers, such as Brett Easton Ellis, do the same.

While the Western Canon will always be marvelous, we need for literature about life in big cities, sprawling bureaucracies, and all the rest of modern living. Fiction that grapples with — and doesn’t just reflect — the alienation and challenges of our world without accidentally glamorizing it is rare. A star exception to this is the work of Raymond Chandler. ...

https://www.amren.com/blog/2020/08/white-men-should-read-raymond-chandler/